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EU: The Acute Crisis No One Wants To Talk About

While many Europeans are obsessed with the disaster that is supposed to engulf Britain after leaving the EU, hardly anyone is following the crisis unfolding in the EU. It is time to connect the dots.

So, it has finally happened. A EU nation has left the Union. What everyone is missing is the fact that this is the end of a significant political era in Europe: the death of the fabricated teleological discourse of the monolithic agent of peace, democracy, and progress in Europe, the European Union.

Yes, there had been democratic setbacks along the way for the EU, such as the Danes rejecting the Maastricht Treaty in 1992 (A second referendum was forced upon them and passed). They then rejected the Euro in 2000. Ireland spurned the Nice Treaty, but again a second referendum was crammed down their throats. 2003 the Swedes rejected the Euro. The proposed EU Constitution was turned down by French voters in 2005 and Dutch voters in 2008. In an act of democratic infamy, the constitution was withdrawn and then passed as the Treaty of Lisbon, thus avoiding seeking democratic approval from EU voters. Then there was Iceland that in 2013 withdrew its application to join the EU as the consequences became clear. That was hushed up.

In 2016 with Brexit the majority of voters of an EU nation in a democratic process decided that the European Union had not fulfilled its promise. They were of the opinion that they would be better off outside the EU, democratically determining their own policy, free of a superimposed neo-liberal regimen. Good, the EU political elite claims that the referendum had nothing to do with the Union, but was the result of the failure of the political class in Britain itself and a deceived British populace. The EU political elite has not even once asked what their role in Brexit might have been.

Let us leave the EU-Romantic, the Ode to Joy, and all the “Oooooh EUs” behind us and we shall recognise that the EU has been mainly about the imposition of neo-liberalism in Europe. As many of us have learnt from Quinn Slobodian’s brilliant book “Globalists”, neo-liberalism was just as much a political as an economic project, entailing the destruction of democracy, which meant reducing the nation state from a functioning democratic institution to a geographical unit with a flag, national anthem, folklore, and a national team for sporting events – and of course defending the interests of capitalism with state terrorism.

The Four Freedoms of the EU have nothing to do with democratic aspirations, instead serving the domination of international corporations: Free movement of capital, services, goods, and labour (mostly the cheap sort from Eastern and Southern Europe). Where this is all going was made clear by the ugly face of the EU, Guy Verhofstadt: “The world of tomorrow,” he recently claimed, “is not a world order based on nation states or countries. It’s a world order based on empires.” Meant is a financial and trading empire, supported by an EU army, which is why the EU is investing much more effort in the creation of an army than stopping the climate crisis. And EU citizens? They are their to serve The Empire. This is not an empty threat. Verhofstadt has been made head of the planned EU Conference on the Future of Europe, still another top-down un-democratic exercise by the EU political elite.

The whole discussion about Brexit has been fatally flawed, driven by mainstream media. Their discourse has been a reversed Star Wars narrative, the virtuous Empire versus the nefarious Republic. In fact, the EU has been class war from above and a majority of British citizens voted to take a first step to end this. The EU political elite and continental corporate media put the blame on a band of second rate political opportunists who exploited the political situation to catapult themselves into power. Opportunists need opportunities, and the EU is ceaselessly providing these. It is the EU political elite and their neo-liberal TINA that have created the populist movement in Europe, something that so many economists (non-German) have been warning of for years. The EU “Liberal Democrats” have been able to save themselves up to now by claiming that the populists are destroying the EU. Their message is: “It is the fascists or us!” It is just a matter of time until the retort comes “It can’t be any worse than what we have now” as occurred in Brexit.

Brexit has had one great advantage for the EU political class: It has distracted from the inexorable crisis of the EU. The EU hegemon, Germany, realises it is losing its grip on power as the political and economic situation in the Union deteriorates. Thus they pushed through a German as President of the EU Commission. Even here they were made aware of the current state of EU affairs, as the epitome of German political mediocrity, Manfred Weber, was rejected. They then sent the corrupt, failed German Defence Minister, Urusla von der Leyen, who only won thanks to support from the “far right populists” in Hungary and Poland (at what price we do not yet know) and EU parliamentarians for Britain’s Labour Party (who had claimed they were going to end such back room, corrupt